Thanks!

Totally agree! Just starting with my new Edge and thought it was very daunting after doing DSO's but you've cleared up so many question marks!

Glad it helped!

What abut his grandma and dog? They are important, too.

Thanks!

Glad it helped!

Not bad for a first telescope! :)

Thanks!

Awesome! Glad it helped.

Glad it helped!

Thanks!

Glad it helped!

@@EarthtoSpaceScience I too am using a Mac and I tried yesterday for the first time to capture the moon and I did but it saved all the shots in pdf files instead of AVI file, how do I get it to save automatically in AVI files? I'm just trying to do a basic capture to start learning.

I’ll try to do that here in the next couple of days. It varies some depending on what I have on there at the time.

I have an ADC but don’t usually bother with it for quick sessions and because I usually try to image with the planets as close to the meridian as possible so they are higher up. I live in Oklahoma so the planets are of course higher in the sky than for folks farther north. I’m not 100% sure what the best location is for it, but sometimes I’ll have it in front of the powermate and sometimes behind it.l depending on how I have things set up the previous time and what is fastest if I use it. Often when I image it is just for 15 mins before work in the early morning and I don’t want to mess with the added complexity.

I started with a DSLR with an APS-C sensor as well. Those usually don’t do quite as well unless the video can be saved in some type of raw format because the compression algorithms introduce artifacts and stuff. But, seeing can be the biggest issue. Also, since you have an MCT, it can be hard to get the scope in thermal equilibrium. Heat plumes coming off the scope while it is cooling will cause similar wobbling in the image. You can either let your scope sit for an hour before using it (if you are taking it from a warm house to a cool outdoors) or prevent it from cooling by wrapping in some insulation. You can’t fix good seeing obviously, but need to try to image when there is a ridge of high pressure aloft which means winds aloft are very light and seeing is usually better. That rarely happens across most of the US during the colder half of the year but is often the case during the summer on those hazy days. During the winter, when a surface high pressure is centered over you and the sky is crystal clear, you usually have the jet steam directly overhead which wrecks planetary views. Only real way to get good planetary images is to try a lot and hopefully you will get some days where the air is nice and steady.

@@EarthtoSpaceScience Yea the MCT definitely needs a little time to cool down I've noticed, but I think my main obstacle is the turbulent air here on the mountainous coast. I'm lusting for the C8EHD a bit, but I'm guessing anything with that high magnification would be similar in that regard, so I may opt for something more widefield instead. Thanks for all that, great info :)

Thanks! At the moment I have the baader focusing eyepiece holder for the eyepiece side. The camera side is the baader click lock. You could use a focusing eyepiece holder on the camera side too which would give a little finer control on focusing but I’ve recently picked up the celestron motorized focuser which I like using a lot since the mount shakes when focusing by hand but not at all with the motorized one.

@@EarthtoSpaceScience i printed a unit to attach my ZWO EAF to this older lx200 8" widefield. torn on camera though. Staying with ZWO, what you recommend for my 8" 1260 f6.4 barlow with a 2 or 3x that would also work with a C11 with a 2x barlow?

I think the 385 I have would work well with both, using a 3x barlow in the 8” and 2x in the 11. That would put you around f/20 in both so should work reasonably. However, I believe some of their new cameras that came out this year have lower read noise and perform better and are similar price but I haven’t looked into them much yet.

@@EarthtoSpaceScience I ended up order the 662mc and love it so far, though ive only used it at 1260mm native. I also ordered the 2.5x powermate, t ring adapter and a couple eyepiece holders. ANother question... How does the flip mirror attach to the scope itself?

You have to pick your baader adapters. You can get a 1.25” or 2” nosepiece with T2 threads to attach to the diagonal or get an adapter that allows you to attach right to the SCT threads. They have a bunch of options.

I think so since it has the beefier tripod. Getting the electronic focuser will help a ton.

Yeah, it is tough. I just had it out again for the first time this year last week and forgot how coarse the focuser is. Lots of back and forth to get there. I would like to either add a feather touch or an electronic focuser to help with my planetary photography.

I honestly haven’t tried to reach the optimal focal distance. I just have the powermate threaded right onto the camera which moves the camera a lot closer to the powermate lenses. You can buy a televue t-ring adapter for the powermate which allows you to thread it directly onto a camera that has t threads. That moves the camera at least a couple of inches closer to the lenses in the powermate versus just inserting it into the powermate as it normally is. The focus range on an SCT is huge so reaching focus is rarely an issue but you do introduce optical problems if you are far from optimal focal length. Obviously with a refractor or other telescopes your range of focus is way more limited so small changes in the camera position can be pretty critical for reaching focus.

The UV/IR cut filter does make a big difference since the IR sensitivity of the cameras is high and the IR is usually out of focus relative to the other colors. Plus it screws up the color balance. Of course I really only get good seeing consistently during July and August and maybe during June and September. My Jupiter images always look like mush if I try to image during the winter since the atmosphere is way turbulent aloft during the colder months of the year.

@@EarthtoSpaceScience Thanks, order placed! I know 19* is terrible for Jupiter, just trying to work out the kinks and get a good flow going for when Saturn/Jupiter/Mars returns. Meanwhile, just on a lark I tried for Uranus and managed to barely pick up 5 moons. I'm thinking of doing a short animation if I can last that long. 😆

Thanks! No, I don’t have a focal reducer. You don’t want to use it for planetary since you want to boost focal length and focal ratio, and not reduce it, but for deep sky imaging it is very helpful since you want the focal ratio as short as you can get.

@@EarthtoSpaceScience Perfect!

No I didn’t and I didn’t use any auto guiding since you don’t need it for planetary imaging. I’ve even imaged with a manual alt-az Mount, even a couple of times with a photo tripod with a pan head. Since the exposure times are so incredibly short you don’t need tracking. It makes life a lot easier to have reasonably good tracking though so you can use a smaller field of view when imaging and this get a higher frame rate and a smaller file size to process.

I’ll have to see if I can dig up some data from a smaller scope and see what settings I used. But, it totally depends on the focal length you image at since ultimately it depends on the size of the planet in the image in terms of what settings you can use. Plus, they will vary with seeing so it is always a trial and error game. I have probably a dozen sets of settings I’ve used that serve as starting points but I always end up tweaking them each time anyway since each set of data is a little different.

The filter will screw up the color balance but you can usually adjust that in post processing.

You can totally do that. I did that when starting out. The avi format will allow you to produce a somewhat better image since there is no compression. But you can use a regular mp4 or whatever as well. There could be some compression artifacts that get introduced, but I have had pretty good results and it does allow you to capture a wider field of view which can be good for trying to get the moons or other background stars or whatever.

I’m also using crossover on my iMac, but I have a windows VM on my MacBook Pro and so just run them on windows on my MacBook. On a previous Mac I ran them using winebottler but couldn’t get them to work on the newer versions of macOS so just used crossover.

I’ve added a Celestron motorized focuser. It helps a ton. I have an ADC but rarely use it. It helps some but I also live in Oklahoma so the planets are usually high enough when crossing the meridian to where it doesn’t make a huge difference most of the time. Main issue is that it is a pain to get setup because my evolution mount isn’t stable enough to withstand all the adjustments. It vibrates a ton when trying to adjust it so it makes it hard to tell what you are doing.

I’ve only stacked tiff images when I needed a large field do view from my dslr or something like that and wanted full frame images instead of cropped in video. It is possible your days planetary images would be better stacking lots of tiffs, I’m not sure. But it is more of a hassle so I don’t usually bother.

You might be able to get it from here: astrowhat.com/resources/planetary-imaging-preprocessor-pipp.38/

Not yet, one day. I’m still not great at that processing and have tried affinity photo l, pix insight, etc. steep learning curves on the deep sky processing to get to where you feel like you know what you are doing and have a repeatable process.

So, on my older Mac that had and older macOS version, I could run it using winebottler. However, that won’t work on the newer versions. I can run Autostakkert and Registax using crossover, but I also have a full windows install on my iMac and MacBook Pro using VMware fusion which works great. I’ve used that on macs to run windows for work software I needed for probably close to 15 years now. Obviously you have to buy a copy of windows 10 or whatever to do that which is a bummer.

Yes, you can stack in Registax and some other programs as well. I personally like autostakkert better, and I get better results but that could in part be because I’m more familiar with it. You can also do a lot of processing in PS, I just don’t have a full version of that software.

I’ve had that happen in the past but don’t remember why exactly. Have to just keep trying different settings in PIPP related to the color settings. The proper settings may vary with camera and the type of video you record (avi, etc)

So it is really more about f ratio and pixel size on the camera. Your mak is already f/15 so going with a 3x barlow would push you to like f/45 which probably wouldn’t give good results. Probably don’t want to go past f/30, but it depends on the pixel size. Bigger pixels and you can go higher f ratio, smaller pixels you have to stay lower. But your end image size can end up being the same in terms of pixel width.

@@EarthtoSpaceScience Thank you for that advice. My camera is a ZWO ASI462MC with 2.9pixels so I;ll stay with x2 Barlow.

I’ve never tried using one of the ASIairs but it is something I’ve wanted to setup eventually. So I’m not sure exactly what the best practice is for that setup with an evolution. I know people have done it however.

So with those when you lower resolution you are just cropping in on the sensor, not using the whole sensor and binning the pixels. As such, the lower you make the resolution the faster the frame rate you can get since there is less data to transfer. It also makes the final file size smaller.

It is really hard to remove them. My Pixelmator app has a healing brush that sometimes will work on things like that by it is pretty hit and miss.

I use a baader flip mirror. There may be other brands as well. Usually when imaging I just use a baader or Celestron zoom lens. If I’m mainly observing the planets visually I will use my televue eyepieces since they are a little sharper but I have to swap eyepieces since they are all fixed focal length. The zoom eyepieces are nice for quick looks.

I’ve used gimp in the past but not in a long time. I’m sure it is way better now than it was years ago.

For imaging the planets, there is kind of a learning curve since you have to get better at the actual process of imaging, and then there is a lot to learn on the processing side. I would start out by buying a t mount adapter for your canon cameras, and a tmount to 1.25" adapter so you can attach it to your existing telescopes along with a televue 2.5x powermate since you will probably use that in any setup anyway. The give it a whirl with your refractor and 10" dob. You also need to get a UV/IR cut filter for planetary imaging. You will need that with any camera setup generally. it will help sharpen your images since cameras are usually sensitive outside the visible range and particularly with the refractor, those wavelengths won't be in focus with visible light. Then you can try out the image capturing and processing. It is easier to capture with a dslr or related camera since you don't have to worry about your computer, but you have to make sure you don't overexpose it, so capture the video using the fastest frame rate and lowest ISO you can get away with. Probably you will need to experiment to figure out what settings work best for each camera. What looks good on video playback won't process the best, it needs to be "a little too dim" on the video playback to be just right for processing. The M50 might work really well actually since at least for 4k video recording I believe that camera does 1 to 1 pixel recording. I think it just crops down to that number of pixels. The issue with DSLR video recording is that you want to avoid it using multiple sensor pixels to produce one final pixel in the video since that is reducing resolution in your final product. If you get a new telescope, the 9.25 SCT will out perform the 8" on planets, but it is a lot larger so setup is a bit harder. Astro cameras are really cheap compared to DSLR or mirror less cameras, so you can always pick up a ZWO 224MC which is a good starter planetary imaging camera and try that out with a laptop. But, starting with one of your existing Canon's I think would be a good way to go as well since you don't have to worry about juggling a laptop with your telescope setup when first starting out with imaging. I'll still sometimes use my Canon SL2 for imaging, especially if i am trying to get a wider field of view say with a planet near the moon or when we had the jupiter and saturn conjunction.

Yes, I’m running on a Mac. I use three different setups depending on which computer. I have used Crossover for mac on one (costs money) which works pretty good. I’ve also used winebottler which is free and can work good if you can figure out the right settings for your computer. I also have used windows VM software to run the software in a windows VM on the Mac. You can set it up such that the apps appear as native Mac apps and it hides the windows background and all of that or use it as a regular windows setup. I use VMware fusion but parallels does the same thing.

Intel, and yes I’ve set up winjupos on it, using winebottler. I’ve heard people have gotten stuff to work on the M series chips but that is going through an extra layer of emulation so not sure how the performance is.

Update: I turned off normalize and turned of RGB align and it worked this time. Not sure what's going. I'm a total beginner to that point that I haven't even figured out how to properly align my scope yet so who knows...

Using winjupos to derotate the frames would help more than anything probably.

I’ve been meaning to make one but haven’t. With the latest versions of MacOS it is easier to just install windows in parallels or VMware fusion, and then install the windows versions of those software in the windows VM. Crossover for Mac works for autostakkert and Registax generally, but I haven’t gotten it to work with PIPP but will need to try that again. I have it on my list to make a video on installing the software on a Mac using crossover or winebottler but need to get all the latest versions of everything (MacOS, crossover, etc) to see what is what.

@@EarthtoSpaceScience Thank you, let me try with Windows OS.

Unless you use software like WinJuPos to derotate your images, you don’t want to go over about 90 seconds on Jupiter or the fast rotation rate of that planet will cause problems. You can go a couple of minutes on other planets.

So it sounds like you need to reduce your exposure or gain settings to image the moon. You may not be at focus either. Usually you can reach focus without using a reducer to barlow lens with those cameras but it can be hard to find focus. If you swap out an eyepiece with the camera, the camera won’t be anywhere near focus if the eyepiece was at focus, and it can be hard to figure out where to go, so picking a bright object like the moon is the way to go. But, if your gain or exposure setting is too high you will never be able to focus because the sensor will be over saturated with light so it won’t look much different in or out of focus. So, I would try pointing at the moon and then adjusting the gain down until it is dimmer, then trying to adjust focus on your telescope until things look good. Then you can adjust your gain settings again. Keep in mind that you will need to adjust your exposure and gain settings for each object since if you have everything dialed in for the moon, you won’t be able to see anything else, except maybe Jupiter, without cranking your gain settings back up. It just takes a lot of trial and error to figure out what works best for different objects with a given camera and telescope combination. But, once you figure it out for a couple of objects you will have a good idea where to start with other ones too. Keep in mind that if you add a barlow lens or reducer lens, it will result in vastly different camera settings and focus positions, so you have to kind of figure things out again. After a while it becomes no big deal to swap things around but it takes a bit to get the hang of how to set things to work right with different combinations. There is no standard combinations of settings that will work since it will always depend on the focal length, f ratio, aperture, camera specifications, etc you are dealing with at any given time.

I tried on Non M1 Mac. It is faster. looks like in M1 MAC, it can only use 1 CPU. I noticed in your video, it used 4 , same as non m1 Mac

Ok, interesting. I was wondering how it would work on an m1 Mac. I’ve seen people install windows using parallels on the m1 macs and then install autostakkert and Registax and have better success that way. I’ve been reluctant to buy an m1 laptop because of how this software would work.

Yes, you need to keep that around what the SCT is optimized for so you don’t end up losing aperture and that kind of thing. An SCT will reach focus with any kind of configuration since the range of focus is so large but if your sensor is too far back you do end up losing aperture which will result in loss of image quality since you lose both resolution from the loss of aperture and contrast as the central obstruction then becomes a greater percentage of the remaining aperture.

More frames may or may not be better. Seeing varies a lot though and sometimes the images just aren’t going to be good because the atmosphere isn’t very stable. A big issue is also thermal stability of the telescope. If the telescope is warm and still cooling down, heat currents coming off the telescope can also distort the image. Getting the telescope in perfect focus can also be a pain with an SCT sometimes, especially if the view isn’t real stable. Most commonly it is the seeing though which varies a lot from day to day and hour to hour. After you have tried to image many times you realize how much conditions vary. A lot of times the clearest nights are not the most stable. I actually had one of my best views of Jupiter ever through a persistent thin cloud layer.

@@EarthtoSpaceScience Thank you for your reply. My frame rate was ~120-150 FPS which made exposure time ~ 8ms, I understand that using a bit slower frame rate ~90-100 and a corresponding exposure a little longer ~20-30 ms will allow more light = less gain to help lower the noise. Anyway, my results were pretty D good for my first time out. Your video was a big help in getting me started, now for the BEST teacher - EXPERIENCE ;-).....Thanks again.. Hank

One day, I’m just much worse at processing deep sky so not going to make one yet.

Same process for any camera, but Registax/sharpening/etc settings vary with every camera, barlow/extender you use, seeing conditions, etc. it always varies some.

@@EarthtoSpaceScience Ok, thanks you for the quick reply !

It can be hard to figure out where your focus is since it will be dramatically different than with an eyepiece. If you have an eyepiece in that is in focus and then swap out and put the camera in, likely it is so far out of focus you can’t see anything. Set the gain up much higher and maybe use a longer exposure and try to go through the full focus range. Depending on the setup you might need to pull the camera out a little from the focuser to get a bit more focus range.

You can process everything the same using files in .ser. I do that sometimes as well. I’m not sure if one offers any meaningful advantage over the other.

@@EarthtoSpaceScience Ok, thank you. Maybe I have more urgent problems like... all USB 2 ports uah! Thanks.

If imaging Jupiter you usually want to keep each color capture to 30 seconds given the fast rotation rate. Then process and combine those.

@@EarthtoSpaceScience Thanks! Which program would do the combining of the separate channels? Do you do that in Photoshop?

Yes, Photoshop or any other image editing software that lets you do that kind of thing.

Not at this time. I’m still learning how to do a better job with deep sky objects.

@@EarthtoSpaceScience But in the future, is there any hope for this?

@@user-jk1lw7mr7l Yes, I will show videos on processing deep sky images at some point. I just don't want to do one until I feel I can produce good results. It took me a few years to get reasonably good at planetary imaging, so maybe later this year or next year I'll feel comfortable doing some videos on workflows.

@@EarthtoSpaceScience Fine! I am subscribing to your channel and will be looking forward to, like many others, I'm sure.

You can’t expose the stars and planets well in the same image. If you adjust the exposure to show the stars, then the planet will be completely blown out since it is so much brighter. So, to do that, you have to take two sets of data, one for the planet and one for the stars, and then overlay them with the planet masked out in the star field image so the properly exposed planet image is visible. You can also just use one image and process it twice and up the exposure on one to show the stars, but usually you end up with a lot of extra noise to try and remove if you do that. But, that works well for showing the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.

@@EarthtoSpaceScience Thanks.

Does it look that way in the raw video if you play it or just in autostakkert? There are different debayering settings that will impact how it is trying to process the color data in the file. As far as not using fits files, I don’t think it provides much benefit over just using pngs on planetary, but is suppose it might help a bit. it can probably help more if you are messing around a lot with photoshop as a last step or something like that.

@@EarthtoSpaceScience Yes, I needed to set debayering in Autostakkert. Yes, fits file doesn’t give any benefits over TIFF or other file types. Thanks

Yep, a full rotation only takes 9 hours.